Oops. Look at the time, how it flies! The lack of blogging hasn’t been for lack of things to write about, but rather for lack of time to do so. Probably the most exciting thing over the last few weeks has been my cake decorating course – more on that below! The less exciting, but much more time- and brain-power-consuming, has been a busy time at work. Hopefully, that’s mostly under control (for now).
Now, for the really exciting part – the cake decorating course! I’ve been thinking/talking about this for a while, and after New Year’s I finally convinced Charissa to join me. I may have done that by signing both of us up for the course… but who’s counting?
The course is a Wilton cake decorating course offered through Michael’s. Basically, it’s a vehicle for them to peddle as much Wilton stuff as possible, but there are lots of useful skills to be learned as well. It starts with having to buy a course kit (thank you Michael’s for 40% off coupons, because at $50 I wouldn’t see much value in this kit), but it does come with most things you’ll need for the course. You also need to make both the icing and the cake/cupcakes, but for me that’s the easy part.
First week was introduction and practice on cookies. Meh. I kind of wish we’d gone right into decorating a cake (or even cupcakes as in lesson 3), because honestly, I just don’t really think cookies and icing go together that well.
Second week was icing and decorating a cake, as well as learning a few simple patterns. A big cake seems more intimidating than cupcakes, so I struggled a bit with ideas. The cake itself was delicious, though – a white lemon cake filled with lemon curd. YUM!
Last (third) week was cupcakes, and I thought that was the best class so far. We learned a whole bunch of new techniques, and having multiple cupcakes to practice on meant I could try different ideas out on each one.
I think my favourite one is the all-blue one in the picture above, although I love the shaggy mums (the fluffy yellow ones) as well.
One thing I’m not the biggest fan of is that the class seems a little bit too free-form – we learn the technique for a few icing tips, and then are left to go to town with the item we’re supposed to be decorating. For me, the problem with this is that I’m not so much the arty-creative type. I’m not very good at coming up with random swirlie patterns that magically look good when put together. One of the reasons I took the class was to get lots of ideas for design/decoration, and I have to say it’s falling short in that respect. Which, I suppose, means that it’s Internet to the Rescue for next class, when we’re supposed to come up with our own design for a fully-iced cake.
But overall, the course must be going reasonably well, because when I told my coworkers this week that next week will be the last time (for a while) that I’ll be bringing decorated baked goodies, there was some joking around that maybe they’ll all pitch in to send me on the next level of the course. Sounds like a fair trade to me!
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This is clearly where my lack of creativity shows through. I’m pretty disappointed with this cake, although it tasted divine. Dan gave me a 3-cake penalty when I kept complaining about how this one looks, so hopefully I can improve with practice. 
I’ll need to work more on my roses, too, although a big part of the problem was that between all the chatting, I was holding the bag with icing for so long that it had started warming up, softening up the icing way beyond what is practical.
